The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [69]
‘I don’t know. I don’t care.’
‘But do you think it means we’re not allowed to smoke?’
‘If you don’t take your hand off my shoulder I am going to dribble vomit on it,’ I said.
He removed his hand quickly and was silent for perhaps a minute. Then he said, ‘Would you help me look for an ashtray?’
It was seven in the morning and I was deeply unwell. ‘WILL YOU PLEASE JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!’ I snapped at him, just a trifle wildly. Two seats back a pair of Norwegian students looked shocked. I gave them a look as if to say, ‘And don’t you try anything either, you wholesome little shits!’ and sank back into my seat. It was going to be a long day.
I slept fitfully, that dissatisfying, semi-conscious sleep in which you incorporate into your dreams the things going on around you – the grinding of gears, the crying of babies, the mad swervings of the bus back and forth across the highway as the driver gropes for a dropped cigarette or lapses into a psychotic episode. Mostly I dreamt of the bus plunging over a cliff-face, sailing into a void; in my dream, we fell for miles, tumbling through the clouds, peacefully, with just the sound of air whisking past outside, and then the Indian saying to me: ‘Do you think it might be all right if I smoked now?’
When I awoke there was drool on my shoulder and a new passenger opposite me, a haggard woman with lank grey hair who was chain-smoking cigarettes and burping prodigiously. They were the sort of burps children make to amuse themselves – rich, resonant, basso profundo burps. The woman was completely unselfconscious about it. She would look at me and open her mouth and out would roll a burp. It was amazing. Then she would take a drag on her cigarette and burp a large puff of smoke. That was amazing too. I glanced behind me. The Indian man was still there, looking miserable. Seeing me, he started to lean forward to ask a supplementary question, but I stopped him with a raised finger and he sank back. I stared out the window, feeling ill, and passed the time by trying to imagine circumstances less congenial than this. But apart from being dead or at a Bee Gees concert I couldn’t think of a single thing.
We reached New York in the afternoon. I got a room in a hotel near Times Square. The room cost $110 a night and was so small I had to go out into the corridor to turn around. I had never been in a room where I could touch all four walls at once. I did all the things you do in hotel rooms – played with the lights and TV, looked in the drawers, put all the towels and ashtrays in my suitcase – and then wandered out to have a look at the city.
The last time I had been in New York was when I was sixteen and my friend Stan and I came out to visit my brother and his wife, who were then living in a strange, Kafkaesque community in Queens called Lefrak City. It consisted of about a dozen tall apartment buildings clustered around a series of lonesome quadrangles, the sort of quadrangles where rain-puddles stand for weeks and the flower-beds are littered with supermarket trolleys. Something like 50,000 people lived there. I had never conceived of so many people gathered in one place. I couldn’t understand why in such a big, open country as America people would choose to live like that. But for all these people this was it. This was home. They would live out their lives never having their own back yard, never having a barbecue, never stepping out the back door at midnight to have a pee in the bushes and check out the stars. Their children would grow up thinking that supermarket trolleys grew wild, like weeds.
In the evenings, when my brother and his wife went out, Stan and I would sit with binoculars and scan the windows of the neighbouring buildings. There were hundreds of windows to choose from, each containing a ghostly glow of television. What we were looking for, of course, were naked women – and to our amazement we did actually see some, though usually this resulted in such fervent grappling for control of the binoculars that the women had dressed and gone out for the evening by the